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The author highlights two devices that permeate the work of Nathalie Sarraute: the first is common sense and the second, invisible, is precisely the one that represents the work of the writer. These two devices reveal themselves through oppositions between networks of metaphors. The luminous is linked to the surface reality while the other side of reality is depicted by shadows and obscurity. The hidden reality needs its obscurity to survive and is constantly in danger of disappearing under the attack of the known reality, under its being lit. This opposition between light and shadow is strengthened by a series of objects and shapes characterized by hardness and brightness. Enfance introduces a mother whose omnipresence and luminosity make her terrible. The writer’s work here is to ward off this excess of visibility and to immerse these images in the complexity of the veiling. An analogy is proposed between Sarraute’s conception of writing and the work of the psychoanalyst—the writer and the psychoanalyst creating an overlap between the real and the signifier, both exploring and respecting the shadowy part of the subject.